


Learning is Fun-damentally Overrated

by paulatheprokaryote



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Academia, F/F, F/M, M/M, Marauders' Era, Modern Marauders (Harry Potter), Secret Relationship, bio is better, biology grad school, everyone hates the chem department, jily, math grad school, terrible flirting, told mostly by evan rosier, wolfstar
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-14
Updated: 2018-01-14
Packaged: 2019-02-14 20:51:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13015884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paulatheprokaryote/pseuds/paulatheprokaryote
Summary: a tale of door slamming, expert reconnaissance, rival grad departments, and unconventional love.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> If you'd like to listen to me read this story to you here's the link: https://mixstep.co/fpsgb4q16buo
> 
> TW: Background sexual harrassment on the part of Gilderoy Lockhart (professor) toward Lily Evans (grad student)  
> Thank you so much to Sam (Dojh167) for the story title!

The door slamming had started up again.

Evan Rosier had been minding his own business and watching a CrashCourse video in preparation for the phys lab he was meant to teach in half an hour. He was hungover and cranky because Marlene dragged him, Lily, Mary, and Fabian out to Beech Street the night before to hit every single bar before 3 am met them puking in the backseat of an Uber on their way to Lily’s place.

Of course he’d left his headphones at home and Lily’s weren’t sitting at her desk like they usually were and the bio grad office was empty so he didn’t think anyone else would mind. He’d forgotten about the math grad office across the hall full of uppity assholes.

The scarred up one that Marlene had nicknamed Werewolf had stood up surreptitiously, glared into their office, and then slammed the math door so hard that the office hours sign hung crooked.

Evan huffed in annoyance.

“Damn, it’s not even 10 a.m. and they’re already slamming the door?” Marlene snorted as she entered the office carrying two cups of coffee and a pastry.

“It’s hot,” she said as she plopped one cup on his desk and settled into Lily’s chair next to his.

“It was Werewolf this time. He’s got a thing about Youtube, ” he grumbled, hissing when he took a sip of the hot black coffee. “Fuck, this is hot.”

“If only someone had forewarned you,” Marlene said mildly as she rolled her eyes.

“Is Lily in yet?” Evan asked, glazing right over Marlene’s sarcasm.

“She’s upstairs dealing with the chemistry department. The lab is missing the good pH meter and so she’s after the usual suspects,” she said and gave him a knowing look.

“That greasy bastard still thinks he can do whatever he wants. She’s going to be in a foul mood today.”

He nearly groaned at the idea. Lily was a hardass when she wasn’t hungover and arguing with Snape. She was going to be a nightmare.

“Hence the pastry that I’ll be leaving on her desk.” Marlene waved it in the air.

“So, was I completely obliterated last night or did it look like Fabian and Mary were hooking up at that last bar on Beech last night?” Evan squinted at Marlene.

“Oh no, they totally were. Lily said Fabian and Mary were still snuggled up together on her couch when she left this morning.”

“They’re either going to be dating and insufferable or they’re going to be ignoring each other and insufferable.”

“You forgot option number three. They could secretly hook up and fight like usual and still be insufferable.”

“Quit, I’m still queasy from last night. If I puke it’s going to be in your trashcan,” he threatened with fake gagging noises that caused real bile to slither up his esophagus.

A rasp on the door caused both of them to glance up and stare in surprise. Doe Eyes, as Marlene had named one of the other math grads, was standing in the doorway. He frowned when he looked at Marlene in Lily’s chair before glancing down at a book he was holding.

“Uh,” he mumbled intelligently. Marlene and Evan shared a look.

“I, well, this is Lily’s desk, right?” He asked as he stepped in, gesturing to where Marlene was sitting.

“Lily?” Evan asked, surprised that he was on a first name basis with Lily when none of them knew any of the math grads except Dorcas Meadowes. They only knew of her because Marlene was insistent that she was Aphrodite incarnate and they were all supposed to spy on her to see if she dropped any clues that she was into the fairer sex.

“Evans?” he added unsure.

“Yeah, this is her desk,” Marlene confirmed with suspicion evident all over her face.

“I saw this book the other day and I thought she might be interested in it. She’s studying stress and reproduction in zebrafish, right?” he asked as he smoothed his unruly hair down with his free hand.

“Yeah, she is,” Marlene agreed, sharing a sideways glance with Evan.

“Cool. I’ll just, well, I’ll just leave it here for her then.” He sat the book down gingerly in front of Marlene, gave it a pat, and then swept across the hall in a hurry.

“That was weird, right?” Evan gauged Marlene.

“Super.”

“Cool.”

Evan’s watch buzzed in alarm and he glanced down.

“Shit, I’ve got class in a few minutes.”

“Same,” Marlene glowered at the clock on the wall above the shared bookcase.

“I never finished my CrashCourse,” Evan groaned.

“Just do one of the Kahoots and when they totally bomb it, tell them you want them to find the answers themselves and provide citations.” Marlene winked at him before snatching her keys off the desk.

“I love a good pre-programmed pop quiz first thing in the morning,” Evan said blandly.

During the Kahoot he quickly wikipedia’d the lesson of the day and it went fine. He forced the students to look up any answers he wasn’t quite sure of himself and everything went swimmingly. The students hated him, he hated them. Everything was at a perfect equilibrium.

“Kahoot?” Marlene asked once he was back in the office.

“Bombed it, made them do the work,” he confirmed with a swift nod of his head.

“Awesome.”

Lily hurried into the office just behind Evan looking rather frazzled. Her usually neat, straight hair was a tangle of waves pinned back from her face and her face was burning with livid rage. She looked positively wild which was reassuring to Evan. There was something soothing about watching Type A personalities be as human as the rest of the world.

“Everything okay, Lils?” Marlene asked with a crease of her forehead and downturned lips.

“Severus is being an absolute asshat, my students are literal garbage fires just waiting to happen, and Lockhart tried to hit on me in the lounge.” She huffed as she dropped into her chair.

Evan wanted to print out a meme that said “*existential crisis intensifies*” and paste it on her wall later today. He scribbled the idea into his planner.

“Ew.” Marlene added helpfully.

“Say the word and we’ll start Operation Fungus Among Us 2.0 in his sample fridge,” Evan suggested only half seriously which caused both Lily and Marlene to burst into a fit of giggles.

“Can you imagine?” Marlene snorted as she did, in fact, imagine.

“That would be brilliant,” Lily said.

“Uh, Lily, do you happen to know Doe Eyes? He left you something on your desk.” Marlene remembered the book suddenly. Lily bit her lip in puzzlement before noticing the book and grinning.

“James,” she said simply before stroking the cover of the book with her palm.

“James,” Marlene repeated shooting Evan a quirked eyebrow.

Lily suddenly flushed and pulled her hand back.

“Remember the asshole that spilled his coffee all over my shirt right before I had to teach last week?”

“How could we forget after the enthralling half hour tirade you subjected us to,” Evan said dryly.

“Well, that was James,” Lily said as if that explained everything. It most certainly did not.

“You didn’t mention that he was Doe Eyes of the math department,” Marlene accused.

Lily shrugged, but was saved by Fabian and Mary finally coming in the office for the day. If Lily looked frazzled they looked entirely unraveled.

“And what hour do you call this?” Marlene demanded in a motherly tone that made Evan cringe. He scribbled down a reminder to call his mom today in his planner.

“Shove off. We just have office hours today.” Mary blinked in annoyance.

“Can we dim the lights in here?” Fabian protested meekly, ignoring Marlene’s teasing.

“Yeah, maybe a little mood light?” Evan joked causing both Mary and Fabian to blush.

“Actually, let’s turn the volume down in here too.” Fabian groaned before collapsing into his chair and tucking his head into his arms.

Evan rolled his eyes, but caught a flushed Doe Eyes–James–walking out of the math grad office. It didn’t escape his notice that his eyes were set resolutely on the pretty redhead sitting beside him or that her own eyes were following after him.

“I think I’m going to go get some coffee,” Lily murmured suddenly, “Anyone want some?”

“Please and thank you,” Mary muttered next to Fabian who raised up two fingers in response.

“I’ll be right back,” Lily said as she hurried out of the office.

“We could be good friends and not be nosey,” Marlene addressed Evan after Lily slipped out.

“Or we could investigate.” Evan grinned devilishly.

“We could,” Marlene agreed. They both hopped out of their chairs and stalked out of the office toward the lounge.


	2. two

“It’s funny how Marlene and I decided to go get coffee, but we missed you in the lounge,” Evan said as he luxuriously swirled his coffee stirrer later that afternoon.

“Yeah, we actually hung out in there for quite some time in case you needed help carrying all three of those coffees back to the office,” Marlene continued as a flaming Lily adamantly avoided eye contact. 

“We wondered where you had been?” Evan asked innocently.

“Uh, you know, I ended up caught up in one of the professor’s offices,” Lily answered vaguely as she sat the coffees down on her desk before distributing them to Mary and Fabian. 

“Which professor?” Evan pushed with false casualness causing Marlene to smirk. 

“Oh, um, McGonagall,” she answered hesitantly. 

“It’s very odd then indeed,” Marlene began with a mischievous look directed at Evan which he met with a clever smirk of his own. 

“You see, McGonagall was also in the lounge with us. She had been arguing with Filch about cleaning the lab benches. He contaminated one of her projects.” It was a complete and utter lie.

“I just find it difficult to imagine her in two places at once,” said Evan with a grin.

“But if anyone was capable of it, it’d be her,” Lily eyed the two warily before sitting down at her desk and plugging in her headphones. 

Not once, not twice, but three times Evan noticed the messy haired, doe eyed dork lurking near the door pretending to read the old thesis poster outside of their office. That particular poster was by an absolute idiot named Igor Karkaroff who had designed the habitat restoration project at the university’s Boggart Springs, a glorified tire dumping ground with a rather dark history in the snake caves.

By the twitch of Marlene’s lips he was certain she had seen him too. 

Finally, Lily casually pushed back her chair and strolled out the door without any notification to the others. Marlene raised her eyebrows in a question and Evan nodded wickedly. They were tailing the duo. 

Lily followed a few feet behind James and Marlene and Evan were several feet behind both of them. When James and Lily rounded a bend just after the lounge, Evan and Marlene were stumped. They had lost them. Marlene turned to tell Evan to split up, but then she heard the hushed tones echo harshly down the hall. 

She put her finger to Evan’s lips to shush him when he opened his mouth to express his distress and then he heard it. 

“It’s wildly inappropriate for the administration to restrict which words can be published in scientific studies of any kind! It doesn’t matter where they get their funding from!” Lily’s hushed tones were fiery. 

“I agree that it’s inappropriate, but I’m not sure that it would count as a suppression of the first amendment because it’s specific government agencies. For example, the NSA can’t speak openly about what they find. I think it falls under the same–” A deep voice that most likely belonged to James insisted before he was interrupted. 

“It’s absolutely not the same thing! Words like ‘diversity’, ‘transgender’, ‘evidence-based’, and ‘science-based’ pose no threat of national security no matter how much the neo-nazis want you to believe it!” Lily hissed indignantly. 

The hushed tones dropped to vicious whispers causing Evan and Marlene to exchange a look and continue down the hall. As they turned another corner they were greeted with a bizarre sight of three men, math grad students in particular, all hovering around the water fountain in a tight group nearly on top of one another. The water fountain was next to the musty old entomology lab which was only ever used in the summer and fall semester. 

Marlene and Evan exchanged a quirked eyebrow and stepped quietly to them with interest. The overwhelming smell of mothballs made Marlene want to gag and she indicated as such to Evan by a finger down her throat. Unfortunately her finger nearly made her gag, resulting in a terrible throaty noise in which she had to swallow bile back down. Werewolf whirled around with wide eyes before placing a finger on his lips to shush her. She narrowed her eyes at him as Evan rolled his. 

From the entomology classroom that five grad students were now spying on, phrases such as “the gay agenda,” “fascist pigs,” “reptilian overlords,” and “freedom of fist in your face” were murmured with a passion typically reserved for lovers in the more intimate moments of life. 

Evan leaned closer to the math grad called Padfoot (named such after a very unfortunate incident where he came stamping out of the bathroom with a sanitary napkin attached to his boot) so that he could hear better. 

Marlene slipped in closer with him and jostled his shoulder, causing him to knock into the water fountain. Trying to catch himself as he fell, his hand pressed against the fountain button, causing it to spurt water all over Padfoot who whipped around in anger and shouted “the fuck!” in a growling voice that Evan would have been _very_ interested in had it not been directed at him during a time in which he was meant to be spying on one of his dearest friends. 

James’s deep voice suddenly became awkward and stilted and Lily’s voice became rather shrill and choppy so Marlene gripped Evan’s forearm and pulled him back around the corner and then toward their office. Evan glanced back only long enough to realize that the three math grads, Werewolf, Padfoot, and the Rat (who seemed to eat a lot of string cheeses and needed a nickname) were right behind them. 

Werewolf gave them a quick tip of the head before returning to his office with his friends. 

Lily returned as Evan quickly pretended to enter in pop quiz grades while Marlene shuffled attendance sheets. Mary was snoring soundly with her head folded in her arms and Fabian was nowhere to be seen. 

Lily sat at her desk, humming absently with a pleasant smile. She continued to smile throughout the day as she filed timesheets, reviewed safety protocols, and stapled lab handouts. She swirled her red pen around wrong answers with a glint in her eyes and when she finally clocked out, she only remembered to say goodbye to her dearest friends _after_ she’d already walked out the door and had to turn back around to remind them she was hosting dinner that night at her flat.

Evan and Marlene shared a significant look again. 

Dinner that night was filled with minimal teasing because they didn’t want to spook Lily. While she excelled in everything she tried her hand at, dating wasn’t typically one of those things. If she was keeping her obvious flirt-traction on the down-low they wouldn’t call her out just yet. Even if he was one of the math grads. 


End file.
